Is Blue
Overall: 2/5 stars – marketing 101 information without much meat
First point they make: knowing more about your customers helps salespeople to sell. OK – so the sky is blue, nothing interesting here.
Next point – customer data is silo’d. First step to getting one view is to come up with a common data model. I think this is probably overstated. I can see efforts getting bogged down on things that aren’t that important. Consistency in key fields used for segmentation is important, but lots of the data can be treated as attributes that can add a lot of value.
Next point – Integrated marketing works better. Once again the sky is blue. One view of the contact with data from all marketing channels is required for real time personalization. I agree this is one of many benefits. The paper also talks about the importance of syncing with sales. Once again, that makes sense to me.
They then talk about the 4 stages of data driven marketing. 1 – Marketing data silo’d, 2 – integrated with sales data, 3 – include financial data, 4 – fold in customer lifetime value (CLV). Each stage provides additional data to the customer and accounts records. Getting to stage 4 provides the best returns but is also a lot of work.
Then there is a bit of a disconnect where the paper goes into a sales pitch for Data.com. I don’t see how Data.com helps at all with stages 3 or 4 and even stage 2 is a bit of a stretch. This is not to say the Data.com isn’t hugely valuable, it just seems like this write up is a bit of a bait and switch.
You want to read the whole paper and let me know your thoughts, you can pick up the paper at IDC White Paper Download
